


Icarus

by thricetroubles



Category: Cabin Pressure
Genre: Friendship, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-09-19
Updated: 2011-09-19
Packaged: 2017-10-23 21:25:11
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,832
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/255166
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thricetroubles/pseuds/thricetroubles
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Martin was secretly a philosopher, not that he wanted the MJN to know about it though.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Icarus

**Author's Note:**

> Title: _Icarus_ , or, _Martin Crieff, the Philosopher Pilot_  
>  Disclaimer: Cabin Pressure is the property of John Finnemore and BBC Radio 4.  
> Acknowledgment: Many thanks to [persiflage_1](http://persiflage-1.livejournal.com/) for Brit-picking and Beta-reading the fic. All errors are mine.  
> Warning: OOCness - since this is Martin and philosophy.

Martin was not quite sure when his fascination with philosophy started. Possibly at six? Maybe. Maybe it was the time when his father told him that no, human beings could not become aeroplanes that started him thinking. _What was a machine? What was a human? Why can't a man become a machine? Because both of them could move – so what was the difference?_  


In the end, Martin spent years thinking about the difference between a machine and the human body, and what made the human body not a delicate machine.

Of course, now Martin had all the proper terms to go with his thoughts. He was secretly pleased, when he reached his teens and could finally understand those introductory philosophy books, that he had engaged in the grand materialist-dualist debate in his own manner.  


And it was how his secret hobby started.  


Martin had never told anyone outside of his immediate family that he read philosophy books just for the pleasure of it. Because his father had been displeased – he was unhappy to find out that his youngest aimed his mind only at the clouds and not something more profitable, philosophically and physically speaking. Simon, being the meanie he had always been, had commented with a sneer that, yes, maybe reading philosophy would make Martin a bit smarter, seeing that he had no brains to begin with anyway.  


And of course, in secondary school he could not tell anyone – he was isolated already, thank you very much. He did not need heavy books and the title “Philosophy Geek” to intensify his predicaments. Flight school had been roughly the same – his schoolmates chatted all the time about big airlines, good jobs, good salaries, and pretty air hostesses who would be _easy_. (Easy for _what_ was a question that even Martin did not need to ask...) So he just stuffed his philosophy books into a false cover – some cheesy novels he picked up at the local church’s second-hand sales – and pretended that he liked cheesy novels instead. Of course his schoolmates had laughed at him, but he guessed it could have been worse. Reading cheesy novels seemed stupid, but reading philosophy seemed stupid ( _because you were not living in the real world_ ), arrogant ( _because you thought you were smart, thinking about the questions of life_ ) and stand-offish (because no other future pilots in his school did this).  


The practice of stuffing philosophy books into something else continued after he started working for MJN. He knew Douglas did the same, hiding magazines in false covers – after all, all it took to spot a master thief was another master thief, wasn’t it? But since Douglas had never bothered to try finding out what he was reading (knowing Douglas, he possibly presumed that Martin was reading dirty novels like himself with the dirty magazines), and Arthur could never quite understand whenever he chose to take a peek, life was fine for Martin and he continued to hide his philosophy books under the covers of the books his removals customers had discarded.  


(To his credit, he always finished those books before taking the covers off – Martin did not want to destroy anything useful and valuable or accidentally philosophical.)

That encounter with Carolyn was a close enough one though – luckily Carolyn only saw the logic symbols on Wittgenstein’s _Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus_ and thought it was something on aerodynamics. And Martin had been careful ever since, because he was certain if Douglas or Carolyn found out, they would not stop laughing for at least a month.  


Turned out that reading in his bed when sharing rooms with Douglas was a mistake though.  


Truth be told, being an amateur philosophy reader there were lots of things in the books that Martin could not understand, or had to take a break every ten pages just to make sure he could understand what was going on (or go back to previous chapters if necessary). And that night Derrida became his undoing – _The Gift of Death_ proved to be hard and Martin had had a difficult flight with a narrow escape from a thunderstorm just a bit earlier. So in less than half an hour Martin surrendered to Morpheus instead.  


And of course, Martin’s luck would betray him by allowing the book to fall from his bed and detach itself from its false cover. And Douglas, the nosy parker that he was, would have to come picking up the book to have a peek because he'd finished his own dirty magazine. But Martin did not know this, not yet, because after a glance Douglas decided that while the book and the secret reading habits of his Captain might prove to be good teasing materials, the book itself was not so interesting at all. So Douglas simply put it back into its false cover and placed it on Martin’s nightstand instead.  


On the subsequent flight back to Fitton, when Gertie was flying through the bright blue skies at a rather leisurely pace on autopilot, Douglas struck.  


“So, Martin... a secret philosopher? Imagine my surprise!”  


“...how? The book!” To Martin’s credit, his only reaction was to shift in the seat suddenly and start blushing furiously. _It is Simon all over again._ Martin’s mind cautioned, and he braced himself for the inevitable insults.  


“Really, Martin. Why would you see the need to use false covers for _philosophy books_ of all things? You might mislead the others into thinking you are reading something _interesting_!”  


“It IS interesting! Not that you would understand – I bet you have a _Playboy_ or something equally _blue_ under that cover of _Times_ you were always reading?”  


“Now, now, no need to get defensive, Sir. I had not started teasing you... yet. Why philosophy though? I am under the impression that our _gallant Captain_ ’s only hobby is flying?”  


“Because it feels almost as good as flying?” Martin mumbled under his breath.  


“Do enlighten me, O Aristotle. Because I am absolutely not seeing any connection between the two, or is it a purely philosopher’s thing mere mortals like me will never understand?”  


“Douglas...”  


“Well, Aristotle? Or do you prefer Derrida?”  


“Okay, okay, give me some time...” Martin started sitting a bit straighter and tried to gather the confidence he needed for the explanations. After all, this was what he liked and if Douglas ended up laughing, it would be Douglas’s fault, not his – or at least he hoped that this time would hurt less than the time with Simon? “Fine, for one thing... I do not enjoy classical philosophers like Plato and Aristotle as much as those Continental philosophers. Sometimes the metaphysical thinking from ancient philosophers sounded like speculations and philosophy is not speculation – well, not most of the time...”  


And when Douglas did not reply, Martin pressed on, “If you must ask I’d say I like Nietzsche. I do not entirely agree with his slave morality theory, not entirely, but I do agree with his idea on the will to power – probably the reason why I insisted on becoming a pilot no matter how long it took to achieve in the first place, because being a pilot, sitting in this seat in the flight deck,” he gestured around, “heightens my sense of agency. On the contrary, being a man with a van or an electrician doesn’t.”  


“And why I like philosophy? Because it is a constant search for perfection. Like the sky is perfect – no matter if it is raining, if there's a thunderstorm developing right in front of me, or it's still, bright and sunny like today, it's always perfect, already perfect in itself. And philosophy is to know the truth, to conceptualize, to think about the possibility of perfection, of perfect worlds. So in a very similar manner, it is like flying to perfection – flying to the skies.”  


 _Was it fascination in Douglas’s eyes?_ But Douglas had only nodded at him, silently asking him to go on, so on Martin went, “and because, just like what Marx said about religions, I need the flying and philosophy. I need the perfection, the freedom from earthly constraints, earthly griefs and sorrows and injustices, to help me to live through the daily injuries in life. Call me an escapist if you must, but a man does need to hang onto something if there is nothing much in the physical world he can hang onto. And because everything in this world, money, status, romances, are socially constructed symbols and references and _meaningless_ anyway – _I don’t care about them_.”  


“And do you know that,” Martin’s voice grew quieter, so Douglas shifted himself a bit towards Martin to hear him better. “do you know that I get panicky during emergencies only because the warning alarms and the lights startled me? I do not fear death and dying, because a life is only complete when you face death, or else it would not be a complete life experience. I would have said I don’t mind death even, except that if I were to drop from the skies in Gertie it would mean that you, Carolyn and Arthur would die as well, and that's something I do not want to think about. But if it is only me, in the sky or in the perfect world of philosophy, then I will be good to go, any time.”  


Douglas, now appeared to be slightly alarmed at his fellow pilot’s apparent death wish, attempted to move the conversation away from all these “deaths” that he had been hearing about. “So, Icarus Removals got its name because Icarus was the first to fly towards the sky, to perfection?”  


“No Douglas, no.” Martin smiled sadly, “Don’t you see, Douglas? He died in the skies. He died for the search of the sun – he died for perfection.” And without further remarks, Martin turned to the control consoles and started making preparations for landing – a landing that would not be happening for at least 3 hours.  


In the awkward silence, Douglas vowed to himself that he _must_ speak to Carolyn about Martin after landing, _no matter what_. If social symbols were meaningless to Martin, then at least they could give Martin some human relationships to warm him up. Because he did know that he would be quite scared to fly with a captain who had no problem about dying. And while Douglas did not know much about philosophy, when Martin made that little speech about perfection and death in the morning sunlight, Martin looked so surreal, so peaceful and calm and _cold_ to the point that Douglas almost wanted to touch Martin just to make sure that he would not need to land Gertie on his own because they happened to have a concept of a captain instead of a real, living one.  


And while Douglas could not see philosophy in the way Martin saw it, Douglas at least knew that concepts and the search for perfection were not enough to sustain the emotional needs of an average adult male like Martin in the long run.


End file.
